


The Old Man by the Sea

by framboise



Category: A Song of Ice and Fire & Related Fandoms, A Song of Ice and Fire - George R. R. Martin, Game of Thrones (TV)
Genre: Age Difference, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Daddy Issues, F/M, Fluff, Islands, Older Man/Younger Woman, Rare Pairings, Romance, Small Towns
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-09-03
Updated: 2017-09-03
Packaged: 2018-12-23 00:03:00
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,130
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11977884
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/framboise/pseuds/framboise
Summary: Sansa blows onto the island with the wet winds of autumn, heart bruised from a disastrous relationship, looking to escape from her troubles on the mainland.Davos, the gruff but charming island harbourmaster, who looks after the quay and the boats, and occasionally befriends the seals that bob up and down in the frigid waters next to his office, is quietly tending to his own broken heart.“You’ve got yourself a little drunk, my girl. Easy now, whoopsie-daisies,” he says, as he helps her stumble like a new-born foal across the path up the bluff towards her cottage.What kind of a man still uses the phrase ‘whoopsie-daisies’? Honestly, Davos will be the death of her.





	The Old Man by the Sea

**Author's Note:**

> I decided to write this as a challenge because I love rare pairs and I couldn’t find any Davos/Sansa fics.
> 
> I sincerely hope that at least one person other than me gets round to reading this.
> 
> Modern AU. Utter Fluff and a bit twee. Mostly inspired by the image of Liam Cunningham wearing a fisherman’s sweater tbh.

 

 

Sansa Stark blows onto the island with the wet winds of autumn; when the last dregs of tourists are running to catch their last ferries, their cagoules like little damp primary-coloured flags in the distance; when half the houses of the island have been shut up until next summer; when a newcomer is something to be noted and gossiped about in The Honest Sailor pub in the island’s only town.

She arrives accompanied by a large white, damp, dog; a medium-sized suitcase; and a bruised heart; the last not as obvious on first sight, she hopes, as the other two; and rents a tiny cottage from Melisandre, who is so old there’s no one left on the island who remembers when she was born, and who is also the island’s chief gossip.

Melisandre reports back to the rest of them that evening that the first thing Sansa did, even before she took her coat off, was set up her laptop on the kitchen table with a stack of books next to it.

“She's a writer,” she says, “a proper one.”

Many people visited the island to ‘write’ but few of them ever did. Instead they got drunk at the distillery; slept with the locals they met at the pub; lied through their teeth that they found the bleakness, the cold, the rattling wind, the boredom of life here, inspiring.

“I’ve googled her,” Melisandre says, “her books sell well.”

“Erotica, is it?” Davos asks. “That’s very popular now,” he explains to Harrold, who has raised an eyebrow at him.

But Davos hasn’t blushed. He is in all things open minded; and _each to their own_ is, he admits, an overused, and occasionally mocked, phrase of his.

“No, romance. Like Nora Roberts, or Mills & Boon.” Melisandre says.

“Oh, how lovely,” Jeyne says, and sighs.

“She’s too beautiful to be shut up in her house writing all the time,” Marillion says.

“How would you know?” Davos asks.

“I saw her get off the ferry. Long legs, pale skin, wild red hair like a mermaid.”

“I don’t believe mermaids are restricted to one hair colour in the myths,” Davos muses and dodges the beer coaster flicked at him.

“She looked wholesome.”

“Like bread?” Harrold mocks.

“And beautiful, like a model.”

“Next you’ll say she looked sad.”

“She did.” Melisandre says. “No one moves to a little island like this of their own free will unless they’re sad. Unless they’ve had their heart broken.”

They each take a sip of their drinks, careful not to look at Davos who had moved back here himself, to the home of his youth, after his partner Stannis had passed away a few years ago.

They ask Melisandre more questions about Sansa; and soon a notion starts to form.

A beautiful, heartbroken, writer. A looming, boring, winter that the weather service says will be the coldest and wettest for centuries. A drunken night down at The Honest Sailor.

Thus the bets are made; thus begins the great game of Winter ’17.

Who, the islanders wonder, will be the one to mend fair Sansa’s heart, to win the lady’s hand.

 _To see if the carpet matched the drapes,_ Harrold suggests, and then is roundly slapped by Missandei for saying it.

The islanders are not animals, she says to him as Melisandre accidentally-on-purpose sloshes her beer over his shoulder. The lady in play is not here in the pub to defend her honour so they are beholden to do it for her.

“No funny business,” Melisandre says. “No lies and manipulation and meanness.”

“Just a good old-fashioned game of hearts.”

 

*

 

Sansa finds the island surprisingly welcoming to her and, when she’s not working on her writing, the population seems small enough that she starts to recognise people she passes, to make friends. Her dog Lady seems to like most people too, when she takes her for walks across the hills or into town, and Lady is a good judge of people; she never liked even one of her old boyfriends.

Sansa is invited by so many different people to visit The Honest Sailor that it simply feels rude not to go. It’s cosy in there, with a well-worn carpet floor and low wooden beams in the ceiling. The alcohol selection isn’t very large but she likes their house wine and the pints that Jeyne, the young bargirl, pulls for her.

She comes back again and chats with Jeyne sometimes at the bar; with Melisandre; and the beautiful Missandei, and her sometimes companion whose nickname is Grey Worm. She speaks with Harrold and Marillion, the younger two men on the island, who both offer to show her around should she need a guide, although she tells them she prefers to find her own way, even if it means getting a little lost now and then, and they don’t ask her again.

She meets the island vet, the handsome Willas, too, who always seems to be wrestling with a different animal whenever she sees him - sheep in a field, a guinea pig in someone's front garden, Melisandre's prickly siamese cat – and who Lady adores straightaway.

And she meets Davos Seaworth, the harbourmaster, a man in his early-50s who, although he first appears to be quite gruff; with a permanent frown, greying hair and a thick silver beard; is actually charming and funny; full of stories and good advice.

He also seems like a very practical man, and so he is the one she comes to when she gets a problem with the heating in her cottage.

“I’m sorry,” she says, after knocking on the open door of his ramshackle office on the quayside; which is full of rope and deflated fenders, sea glass and maps, and a giant hulking radio system that looks forty years old. “I’m sorry, but my boiler seems to have turned itself off somehow and I can’t get it back on. I’ve looked for Melisandre and I can’t find her anywhere. I know that you’re obviously not an electrician, and I promise I have tried my hardest to find the right switch, I haven’t just–”

“It’s fine,” he says, halting her run on sentence, patting her gently on the shoulder. “It’ll be my pleasure. I’ve fixed a fair few boilers in my time.”

“I can pay you–”

“Nonsense. A strong cup of tea will do me fine. I’ll get that favour back from you soon enough. Maybe you could help me write a birthday card to my ex-wife sometime, I’ve heard you’re a good writer.”

They walk along the harbour and up the path towards her cottage.

“Was it a contentious divorce then, you and your ex-wife?”

“Me and Marya? Gods, no. It’s just that I’ve written her a hell of a lot of birthday cards, we’re neither of us spring chickens anymore, and I’m running out of ways to say happy birthday.”

She laughs.

“Did you marry again?” she asks.

She hasn’t noticed a wedding ring, but men who work outside, like her father did, rarely ever wear them.

“No, no. I almost did, after they legalised it, but Stannis, who was my partner then, he passed away before we could make it down the aisle.”

“Oh, I’m so sorry,” she says, stopping him with a hand on his arm.

He shrugs his shoulders. He’s frowning but then she’s noticed that his face does that even when he’s smiling.

"What was he like, Stannis?”

“Oh, a force of nature, I suppose,” he says as they continue walking. “Bluntly charming; stubborn as a mule; loyal; tall, dark and handsome, that kind of thing.”

His mouth quirks.

“I’ve met few men or women quite like him,” he says.

“What about yourself?” he asks; as she helps him inside her frigid cottage, and he stops to pet Lady, whose tail is flicking back and forth frantically and who sinks her nose into his side and makes him chuckle.

He bends down under the boiler, and his voice gets muffled. “Do you have any stories of lost loves?”

“Only regrets, and bad memories, I’m afraid. I haven’t been treated very well by men,” she says.

It’s taken some work to be able to admit that, to state it.

She used to always blame herself.

Think if she were only sweeter, kinder, more easy-going, then they would be too.

Her last boyfriend was the worst of them all. His bad behaviour, his meanness, escalated to fists and left her with visible bruises. He was well-thought of in the city, popular and successful; but her father would have hated him from the first, her father would have told her to stay well clear of him, had he still been alive.

She misses her father dearly, dreams of him often. The smell of the cigarettes he sneaked in the evening; his deep laughter; his kindness and fairness; that he’d race around the house giving piggybacks to all his sons and sword fight with twigs from the garden with her wild, younger sister Arya; the cheese toasties he made that no one else could ever make quite as good as him; his love of animals, the way he’d sit and talk to Lady’s mother in such a soft tone of voice; the way he would creep up on Sansa’s mother and kiss her on her neck so that she shivered and they snuck into the next room to snog like teenagers.

He died too young, everyone agreed. And, though Sansa had enough brothers to take over his job at protecting her, at teasing her, it was never quite the same.

Her eldest two brothers are fathers themselves now. She thought she’d be a mother by this age too, by twenty-six, but no man she has met has seemed like a good choice of father to any future children. She’s unlikely to find a husband here. But she’s pleased already by the choice to move here for the winter, to get away from the city and the mainland, and her bad mistakes.

Even if Arya says that Sansa’s going to freeze here on the island, going to turn into a hermit and permanently fuse herself to her sofa.

Sansa’s just finished writing a book months before her deadline; so even if she does become half-sofa half-girl, she’ll have enough money for the good biscuits and wine and a shelf-full of books to keep her company.

Once he’s finished tinkering under the boiling, Davos says goodbye with a cheerio and when she shuts the door behind him her tiny cottage suddenly feels too big for just one person.

She washes up his mug of tea carefully and puts it back in the cupboard, draws out the kitchen chair and sits back down to write.

 

*

 

“How are the bets going?” Davos asks Melisandre a few days later, when she comes down to the harbour to feed the seals with a bucketful of fish she’s caught just for them.

He’s warned her that she’s only going to make them fat by feeding them like that but she replies that fatter is better for a seal and he supposes that he can’t argue with that.

“Some quite high numbers now,” she says, enigmatically.

“You don’t want to place your own bet on anybody?” she adds.

“No, it’s more fun just to watch the lot of you flail about, to be honest. I don’t have a horse in the race.”

“Got to save that money for your grandchildren,” she suggests.

He narrows his eyes at her.

“Grandchildren, I haven’t heard anything about that. Only one of my sons is even married and the two of them are off travelling abroad. Who’s been talking to you about grandchildren.”

“Hypothetical, future grandchildren,” she says.

“Ah, them. They can satisfy themselves with a roll of string and a stick like we did in the old days,” he says, “I’d rather spend my money on whiskey and a good steak flown in from the mainland.”

“The simple pleasures of a homespun bachelor,” she says.

He pokes her side, gently.

“Not all of us look so good in expensive toggle like you,” he says, waving at her outfit.

Today, as is her custom, Melisandre is wearing a long red dress, red cardigan, giant red necklace, and red boots of the finest suede.

“I think you’d suit red,” she says.

“With this beard? I’d look like Father Christmas.”

“Exactly,” she says and he laughs so loudly he scares one of the seals who falls off the rock into the sea with a large splash.

Davos hasn’t got money on any of the islanders but he hopes Sansa does find someone.

A beautiful girl, with a wicked laugh like that; polite and proper and, he can already tell, someone who is comfortable with their own company, confident with their own wants; he’s always found that kind of quality attractive.

A girl who hasn't been treated the way she should have been, the way everyone deserved to be treated by the ones they loved.

He hopes she doesn’t get too lonely during the winter here, up in that tiny cottage of hers, but he’s glad she thought to ask him for help. He’ll make sure he knocks on her door now and then to see if she needs anything. It’s the good neighbourly thing to do. And besides, he’s always liked the feeling he gets from helping others.

He likes to be useful.

He had a girlfriend once who had said it was annoying – his opening of doors for her; the way he always stood on the closest side to the road when they walked together on the pavement; that he’d call her up if there was going to be a storm near her village and check she had enough candles in case the power blew out; that he’d hang up the clothes she left on the floor of their bedroom, without any fuss, arguing that one of them would only trip over them in the night.

 _It’s insulting_ , she had said. _It’s like you’re trying to be my father, I want you to be my boyfriend_.

That relationship hadn’t lasted very long. But no one else he has been with has seemed to dislike his particular brand of care and concern.

 

*

 

A week later Sansa asks in the island shop for a whiskey that Davos might like.

She wants to repay him for fixing her boiler, which is running even faster now and keeping her cottage toasty and warm as she sits at the kitchen table over her laptop; battling with plots and runaway heroines, dashing heroes arriving at the nick of time, villains trying to keep her lovers apart, storms and floods that force the two of them into intimately close quarters.

She’s loved romance stories since she was a girl and is pleased to be fairly talented at writing them, even if her editor is always pushing her to be more dramatic, to put more and more obstacles in their way. In real life, she’s come to believe that the obstacles are often there for a reason, that you should listen to the signs the world might be giving you, the reservations you might have.

But what does she know when she’s still single.

The shopkeeper tells her the best whiskey is sold in the little shop attached to the distillery and so she tramps over to the other side of the island in the rain; along the paths through the heather and past fields of sheep, and cottages clinging to the rocky headlands; following the flight of seagulls ranging overhead.

The shop is empty; the staff must be hiding in the back playing on their phones. There’s not a lot of choice so she takes a large bottle of the island’s finest and moves towards the till.

“That’s her at the counter,” she can hear a voice say suddenly from the backroom. “The _girl_.”

A young man emerges; looking at her with wide, startled eyes. He’s about ten years younger than her she thinks.

“Just this please,” she says, plonking down the heavy bottle and smiling encouraging at him.

“It’s a gift,” she says, as he slowly rings it up.

The boy stops, blinks at her for a moment.

“Is it?” he says, in a half-questioning tone.

“Do you have any wrapping paper or something to put it in?” she prompts.

Then he shuffles around underneath the counter, his face going redder and redder, and finally slides the bottle into a dusty-looking gift bag.

“Thanks,” she says and heads off to the harbour to find the recipient of her gift, now that the rain has cleared.

Davos is out on the quay, surrounded by a group of youngish looking men. They hug him each in turn and he slaps his hand on their shoulders and laughs; then sends them on their way to the ferry. He stands there and watches the boat leave, hands in pockets, looking happy and satisfied.

“Who were they?” she asks, after drifting closer.

“My sons, come across for the weekend to see me.”

“All of them?”

“Yup,” he bobs on the heels of his feet. “Seven sons. Me and my ex-wife had our hands full when they were little.”

“ _Seven sons,_ ” she repeats.

There is something about a man who is a good father, as she can tell that Davos is, about a man who has pride in his children. It makes her feel warm inside, charmed.

“They’re wise to stay on the mainland though. They spent some of their childhood here but every time they visit they can’t wait to flee back across the sea.” He turns to her, “Young, vibrant folk like yourself don’t usually last long on such a dull little island.”

“I’ll take that as a complement and not the veiled insult you might have thought to make,” she says, teasingly.

“You should,” he says, and laughs again.

“I’ve got this for you, for fixing my boiler,” she says.

He pulls the bottle out, “You really shouldn’t have, but I won’t say no to some of the good stuff.”

“You’re welcome,” she says.

“I better put this back in my office before it gets mislaid somewhere.” He tips his head to her and walks off in his heavy boots.

Sansa stands and rubs her arms around herself and breathes in the particular smells of the sea. The seaweed, the fish, the seagulls, the diesel fumes from the boats, and the sweetness of a westerly winter wind.

 

*

 

Sansa visits the pub almost every night now, along with the rest of the islanders. If she has noticed that many of the men, and some of the women (since none of them have managed to ask yet whether she might lean that way too), are awfully keen to talk to her, or to lead her towards those that they might have money on, she hasn’t said anything. But then the islanders are a friendly bunch really to those who move here properly, those who would brave the winter alongside them, so maybe their friendliness would have been the same even without the bet to fuel their attentions.

It’s a Friday night and Petyr, who visits the island now and then trying to get them to buy into his overpriced, shady, energy schemes, slinks in through the door and spots Sansa straightaway. He hasn’t heard of the islander’s bets, and no one, but no one, has put money on him. He’s a sleaze; and the pub watches as Sansa deftly gets him to go away and start bothering some other poor girl instead. Red-headed Ros who has on previous occasions gotten him to give her a fair whack of the notes inside his wallet, just by appearing wild-eyed and keen, quickly swoops in for the kill.

Since it’s Friday, the musical instruments are duly brought out and the band starts up. Drunken hands fumble their way across the worn keys of the upright piano; cover finger holes on the sides of the whistle and the flute; strum strings of the guitar; pound on the stretched skin of the drum; and shake the handle of the bell, Melisandre’s particular instrument of choice.

Sansa finds the way that Davos plays on the guitar a bit cringy, men always get a funny expression on their faces when they’re playing the guitar she thinks; but when he starts singing, in that deep baritone of his, she feels a shiver race up her spine.

“You shouldn’t be impressed by any of our skills,” Marillion says, standing next to her. “It’s only boredom that got us here, not any latent talent.”

“I’ll keep that in mind,” she says, smiling into her pint.

More pints follow, and more conversation and merriment.

Jeyne gets her to have a go herself on the drum and Harrold tells her fortune, with dubious skill, using the lines on her palm. His hair seems blonder than ever in the dim light of the pub but every time she turns away she forgets what his face looks like entirely.

Although maybe that’s the alcohol.

She hasn’t had to buy herself a single drink. She’ll owe a round to everyone soon.

At some point in the night she leaves for home; and Davos, currently the islander with the firmest footing, offers to accompany her.

“You’ve got yourself a little drunk, my girl. Easy now, whoopsie-daisies,” he says as he helps her stumble like a new-born foal across the path up the bluff towards her cottage.

What kind of a man still used the phrase _whoopsie-daisies_? Honestly, he will be the death of her.

Drunk Sansa is half in love with him already. Sober Sansa is currently taking a little holiday in drunk-town.

“It’s ages since I’ve been to drunk-town,” she says, out loud.

“Aye, I imagine it is,” he says, chuckling, "you haven’t got the stamina for it yet but we’ll soon get you up to snuff. No lightweights allowed on the island. Unless you’re teetotal, that is,” he corrects himself, thinking of those who chose not to drink for their own reasons. Those like Stannis, whom he never mocked for choosing to stay sober.

He helps her inside and turns the light on, lines up the boots by the door that she has flung off, so that she won’t trip over them in the morning.

“Thank you for helping me back,” she says and then whips her jumper off with startling agility for a drunk girl, forgetting that she doesn’t have a camisole on underneath.

“You’re welcome,” Davos says; catching a glimpse of smooth, pale skin and delicate black lace before quickly turning away to preserve her modesty and leaving swiftly by the front door.

He pauses once he has shut the door carefully behind him. The wind batters at his warm face.

She really is very beautiful.

 

*

 

The next morning, feeling hungover and a little worse for wear, Sansa hears an odd wailing sound in her back garden and wanders out to find an injured, but very friendly, black cat whose name is Lion according to its nametag. She bundles it into an old jumper and carries it in the rain down to the vets.

Willas sees her straightaway, waving her inside and handling Lion gently as he puts a cast on one of its back legs. His sister Margaery, who Sansa has spoken to at the pub before and is always a bit dazzled by, assists him before dashing out to run her oversubscribed yoga class in the town hall.

Sansa chats with Willas as they wait for the owner of the cat, Myrcella, to call them back; listening to stories about the surprising range of animals he has helped over the years, including a baby seal that Davos had found bloodied by a boat propeller and which is so fond of the harbourmaster who saved him that Willas says it sometimes waits outside his office barking for hours on end, the thought of which sets her off into giggles.

When Myrcella calls again she tells them that Lion actually lives on the mainland and has a habit of hitching rides on the ferry, so she is very thankful to hear that he is ok. Willas holds out the phone so that the cat can hear its owner’s voice and it purrs so loudly it almost sounds like a roar.

Before she leaves, Willas asks Sansa over for dinner and she says yes.

It is a good date. He has wonderful stories and is polite and attentive. He walks her back to hers afterwards and kisses her at the door of her cottage but she doesn’t invite him in and she knows that she will politely turn down a second date.

The kiss didn’t feel quite right; a little too passive for her maybe. But then she knows that first kisses can be awkward and that she could ask him to kiss her in a different way, and he would.

Willas is disarmingly sweet and obviously kind. Her father would have liked him, she thinks. Her tween self would have swooned at him, and his floppy hair and blue eyes, and been right to; he would have been the perfect first boyfriend, the kind of man you’d marry way too young and never regret it.

But she was different now, not necessarily wounded but definitely changed by her experiences, and she wanted other things.

Perhaps if she hadn’t lost her father when she was a teenager. Perhaps then age, and a certain gruff concern, might have not been so appealing.

The love interest of the next book she writes becomes a vet. He saves the heroine’s dog and when he breaks his own leg on the moors out looking for it she takes him in and tends to him and they fall in love and at the wedding the dog carries the rings on his back. Her editor insists on some wrinkles in the plot, however, so that things do not go quite that smoothly: there’s a wicked tycoon who tries to intimidate the heroine into selling her farm, a thief who steals a pedigree dog from the vet’s office and whose owner sues, and a flood that threatens the small town zoo.

She’d tell Willas that he’s made it into her writing but she’s worried that he’d think she’s mocking him, when that isn’t her intention at all; her readers have extraordinary high standards when it comes to the men they want to read about.

 

*

 

She crosses paths with Davos regularly, at the quayside and in the pub, although she doesn’t get drunk enough to need him to escort her back to her cottage again.

He comes and finds her sometimes; knocks on the door asking if she needs anything; brings her a copy of the island newsletter; a pot of grease to fix the squeak in her front door that he noticed before; and, one time, a lobster he caught which she has no idea what to do with, and which he ends up cooking for the both of them on her tiny stove.

No one else bothers her at her cottage and she likes that; likes that she can spend hours writing in long feverish bursts and then make her own way down to town for company, or trudge across the rainy hills to shake a plot point loose in her mind, wander along to Melisandre’s own cottage for some tea and a slice of freshly baked fruitcake.

They let her play the drum in the pub band quite a lot now, though she is still dubious about her own sense of rhythm; and she feels secure enough with her nascent knowledge of the island to offer to take a few shifts at the visitor’s centre. It being winter, she only ever helps two tourists. The first is a strange man who says his name is Beric and that he is looking for ‘ancient ley lines’ but spends every day of his visit down at the pub instead of out searching for them with the dowsing rod he brought; and who was seen, it’s rumoured, leaving Melisandre’s cottage several early mornings in a row.

 _I like them fiery,_ is all Melisandre says.

The second visitor is a startling beautiful woman, a wealthy heiress named Daenerys, who arrives on the island by private helicopter and comes into the centre with a man Sansa thinks is her husband until she spots the translucent earpiece and realises he’s actually her bodyguard. Daenerys wants to visit the ruins to the North of the island, especially the large rock with old carvings that has been nicknamed the Dragon’s Egg for its shape. She says that she is sad not to have arrived in the right season for the birds of the islands to come back from their summer migrations, because she has a passion for bird-watching and then she whips out a well-thumbed photo album to show Sansa the species she has already seen, with a whole section dedicated to the world’s largest eagle.

 _Just look at that wingspan_ , Daenerys says, sighing happily.

In mid-December, Jeyne finally gives birth to her baby and the islanders talk of little else but how cute he is, how good a sleeper, what a heartbreaker he will grow up to be; and no one speaks of who the mysterious father might be because it’s not important when he has a whole island to help raise him.

Sometime after Christmas, Harrold asks her out for a proper drink but she declines, ostensibly because she’s not looking for anything like that right now but really it’s because she has her eye on someone else.

She has her heart set on someone else.

But can she trust it, when it has led her astray so many times before?

 

*

 

One night, in the depths of winter, she watches Davos on the other side of the pub, joking and laughing, watches him when he glances up often to look at her too.

When she gets back from a trip to the toilets she can’t see him inside so she follows the cold air spilling into the pub and goes out through the back door. Someone has set a fire in a metal barrel in the little smoker’s courtyard there and he’s standing alone by it with one hand in his pocket. He stamps out his cigarette end with his boot and smiles at her in welcome.

Sansa smiles back and decides that it is her who will be bold enough to make the first proper move.

So she stumbles over and plants a kiss on him.

Davos returns her kiss; moves his hands to hold her face carefully, brush a lock of hair behind her ear. He tastes of tobacco and something else, something more uniquely him. His lips are firm, his beard soft. He is a man who knows what he is doing and she gladly lets him lead.

The front door of the pub bashes open loudly and they draw back from one another. His eyes search her face. She grins suddenly, a joyful burst of nerves. He rubs a palm over his beard.

“I’m old enough to be your father, girl. Is that the attraction?” he asks, laughingly, but his eyes are intent on hers.

“Perhaps,” she answers, teasing too, but she lets him hear the sliver of truth in her own reply.

 

*

 

Davos understands her a little better now.

He’s always liked looking after people. He has always been an adaptable partner, lover. He finds his greatest pleasure from being needed, from providing something they could not find elsewhere.

Such was the case with Stannis. Stannis, who he could have grown old(er) with and died beside. Stannis, who instead died too soon, with the dignity he had always had; who died, Davos hopes, knowing that he was loved.

But Davos is also a practical man. He will not stay alone and celibate, because life is too short for that, because Stannis himself had wished for him to find someone else to share his life with. As Marya had wished him to find another partner when they themselves divorced many years ago.

Sometimes Davos thinks that Stannis might have suited Sansa better. He had a forceful personality that Sansa might have liked. Although Davos is not so self-deprecating as to be unable to tell that Sansa enjoys his own humour, his warmth and lightness too, alongside any possible paternal vibe.

He had an odd dream a few weeks ago where the three of them – he and Stannis and Sansa – were all together in the hollow of a dune near the beach, limbs akimbo, sand getting into every crease. A superstitious man would have taken it as a blessing from beyond, but Davos is not superstitious.

It is not fate that Sansa has turned up here on the island, that she seems to have developed a shine for him. It is just luck, boats passing in the night, a happy coincidence.

Davos had felt old when Stannis passed; and when he looked in the mirror he had looked older still, his hair grey, his eyes hooded.

When he returned to the island he thought it was unlikely he would meet someone special again; someone beyond a simple companion, a body to warm his bed and an amiable person to read the Sunday newspapers alongside him.

But Sansa is a lovely girl, a girl you might only meet once in your life. Sweet, beautiful, charming. He could love her so easily. Could fall for her as deeply as he fell for his other two great loves.

His mother said to him when he was a boy that he had so much love to give, that though as a Seaworth he would be destined for hardships, he would find his comforts along the way. And she might have noted, if he scoffed, that his seven much-loved children have certainly attested to that. His mother was a daft old thing, really. But she would love Sansa, just as she loved Marya, and would have loved Stannis if she had gotten the chance to meet him.

 

*

 

“Have you seen the stars from the very top of the island yet?” Davos asks, once they’ve both gotten too cold to linger in the courtyard kissing, even standing right next to the fire.

“No,” she says. “Lead the way.”

He takes her hand, folds it into the crook of his elbow as they head out of town and up the hill.

Sometimes the island scares her at night – the true blackness of the dark out here, the wind squeezing in through the cracks of her cottage, the cries and calls of different animals that echo strangely across the hills – but she doesn’t feel a hint of fear with him beside her.

He tells her little stories about the fields and the houses they pass, points out a tall rock he jumped from and broke his wrist as a boy. She tells him about her own childhood on their sprawling family farm, about growing up there with so many siblings, so much life around her, and the sadness she had when they sold the place after her father died. She talks with pride about her mother’s new painting career, Arya’s sky-diving hobby, and the accessibility apps her brother Bran has been developing.

When they reach the top of the highest hill on the island, Sansa can’t say how long they’ve been walking or what time it is. Everything feels dreamlike and slow.

He kisses her once they’ve got their breath back and then pulls her body into the shelter of his, stands behind her to point to and name the different constellations.

She never knew there were so many stars hidden in the sky. As a child she had made up constellations for the ones she could see, argued contentiously about the shapes with Arya, but she doesn’t really remember seeing any stars in the city.

Sansa leans back in his arms and reflects on her time on the island, how happy she has been here, how _settled_ ; how she hasn’t felt the need to be someone else, to put up a front, like she did when she lived in the city. Even if this budding thing between the two of them amounts to nothing, she thinks she’d like to stay here beyond the end of winter.

They’ve been standing there for some time, breath clouding in front of them, when Davos shrugs his shoulders up and down against the cold and she starts to shiver.

“I could do with a cup of tea right now, couldn’t you?” he says.

“How many teas do you have a day?”

“Not too many,” he says, and she turns around to see him.

"It’s the red meat you have to be wary of at my age, not the tea.”

She pushes his shoulder playfully.

“Shall I call down for a stretcher to get you off this hill, old man?”

“You’re a cheeky one,” he says.

“You make me so happy,” she blurts out and he kisses her, tugs her by the waist into the warmth of his body.

He shifts back, glances up once at the sky and then back to her.

“I can’t say that you wouldn’t do better with someone more spry, someone with less baggage," he says.

She can see his easy smile in the faint light of the moon.

“But I think I could be good for you, Sansa Stark. I know _you_ would be good for me. We might just fall in love, I reckon.”

She winds her arms around his neck and kisses him deeply; as the wind whips her hair around them, like the flame of a well-fed bonfire.

“Shall we go back to yours,” he says when they part; and he takes her hand and she thanks the gods for a man who won’t _dilly-dally around_ (another Davos phrase that she has adopted), who will tell her exactly who he is and what he wants.

 

*

 

They walk the path back, ducking forward against the cold wind, and soon tumble out of the weather and into her cosy cottage. He takes his boots off and carefully lines them up next to hers.

Suddenly she has an attack of nerves. She fumbles around the kitchen and puts the kettle on; taps her fingers on the kitchen counter; twists on one leg, woollen sock slumped at her ankle.

He sits down comfortably at the table and spreads his hands along its surface. The kettle whistles. She smiles at him and hands him his tea; splash of milk, two sugars. She hovers, looking through the open biscuit tin on the kitchen table.

“I’m not looking for anything _kinky_ though,” she says suddenly.

She looks up. His eyes are wide.

“I just like that you’re older, that you can look after me – not that you’re obliged to look after me. Sorry. I _really_ don’t want to call you Daddy,” she says, her words stumbling out of her mouth, ass over teakettle.

She was a writer; she was supposed to be eloquent for gods’ sake.

“I know what you’re trying to say. And I want to look after you. I like looking after you. Come here, girl,” he says, warmly, and tugs her around the table and into his lap, lets her hide her face in the crook of his shoulder.

He rubs a large hand up and down her back.

"Is it wrong of me to say that I find you quite attractive when you’re flustered?” he murmurs into her jumper.

“I find you attractive almost all the time,” she says.

“Almost?”

“Not when you’re playing your guitar. You have this constipated face that makes you look like a troll,” she says and then starts giggling.

“A troll, a troll!?” he says, shaking her jokingly. “You might need a spank for that, young lady.”

He feels her body shiver.

She leans closer to his ear.

“Nothing kinky,” she says, “but a bit of spanking might go down well, occasionally.”

“Good to know,” he says and coughs. “Noted.”

 

*

 

Which of the islanders had Davos as their bet to win Sansa’s heart?

Only one. Only Old Melisandre.

Most of them had their money on Willas, who has just got engaged to Myrcella, owner of the ferry-hopping cat.

Some of them had their money on Margaery because if her brother is attractive then she is even more stunning, and just as kind. But Margaery ends up being whisked off by the bird-watching heiress and sends back postcards of increasingly exotic locations that Jeyne sticks to the wall of the pub for everyone to peruse at and feel jealous of.

A few had their money on Harrold, because he looks most like a fairytale prince; Marillion lost money betting on himself; and Robin’s friends pooled their pocket money on him because even if he's shy, sixteen, and currently working a till for a living, he's going to inherit the distillery one day and was thus technically the richest eligible bachelor available.

Only Melisandre had her money on Davos; the rest of the island can be forgiven perhaps, for thinking the age difference too large.

Melisandre; who had been the only one of them too who saw, one day last autumn; a grizzled, frowning man, wearing a scruffy fisherman’s jumper – a man with love to give but no recipient worthy enough for his gruff charms – pause on the path that ran close to the cottage she was renting out to a writer from the mainland.

No one else saw him stop and stare at the girl with the red hair and the broken heart as she arrived for the first time at the door of her new home.

No one else saw him, Melisandre will say – at the wedding of said gruff man and red-haired girl in the church on this same island one summer’s day – fall in love with her at first sight.

Melisandre, who gifts them a wedding present of a new quilt with the money she won in the bet, a quilt for the bedroom of the cottage they have bought from her.

Davos is not a superstitious man, not a man who believes in fancies like love at first sight, but it’s alright, Sansa argues to the crowd at their wedding, she is fanciful, romantic, enough for the both of them. And he cocks his head at that and drags her out onto the dance floor to show how damned _romantic_ he can be. Nine months later he becomes the gruff, but very happy, father of his eighth child; a little girl with her mother’s red hair and her father’s easy charms; and Sansa finds her real-life happy ending.

 

 

 

**Author's Note:**

> I warned you it was fluffy. 
> 
> Apologies for the entire lack of any suspense or dramatic tension; show!Davos is such an affable character that every hitch in the plot kept getting smoothed over as I wrote.
> 
> Please comment if you end up here, I’d love to hear what people think.
> 
> Edit: I've written a second Davos/Sansa fic - [One Night in Tinseltown](https://archiveofourown.org/works/12042609) \- in thanks to the lovely response to this one!
> 
> my tumblr: [framboise-fics](http://framboise-fics.tumblr.com)
> 
> and [rooseboltons](https://rooseboltons.tumblr.com) made [this](https://framboise-fics.tumblr.com/post/165473762067/roosebotlons-sansa-x-davos-moodboard-his) gorgeous photoset for this fic!


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